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Saturday, September 27, 2014

An (Updated) Brief History of Online Star Wars Collecting Conversation

Tommy writes:

As anyone who knows me can probably tell you, I’m very interested
in the history of the hobby. I wasn’t
even alive for a lot of it, but it’s always fascinated me. Years back, I did a timeline which gave a
rundown of where and how collectors in each era stayed in contact with one
another and completed deals.

One of the other editors here thought it would be a good
idea to do a blog post about the growing popularity of collecting Facebook
groups, and I thought I’d add it to the end of my timeline. Technically speaking, this should have been posted weeks ago, before the entire community started discussing Facebook groups, but due to technical problems which I won't bore you with, it's was delayed until now.

In any event, without further ado, I give you an updated brief
history of online Star Wars collecting discussion. Over the years, this community has gone
through a variety of forms that current collectors might not be aware of and I
always think it’s helpful if collectors know where we’ve come from.

The earliest threads I can find all take place on what was called Usenet. Usenet could be considered something in-between email and a discussion forum. Users posted topics to various newsgroups on Usenet, and then other users would receive those posts and be able to reply to it through a news server. In the early days of the internet, it was the easiest and most convenient way to communicate with other users. At that time, most of the people online were at universities and military installations. In any event, the earliest Star Wars discussions I can find are on net.sf-lovers. Posts
there go as far back as January 1982, which is pretty amazing when you think
about it. The most notable thread in the
group is this one entitled:"Is Vader Luke's Father?", which is
always fun to read through. This is one of the oldest SW related threads I can
find, so it’s pretty historic in that respect. One of the oldest collecting references I know
of can be found in fa.sf-lovers, in this thread from December of that year.

That appears to have led to net.movies.sw in May of 1983,
although SW threads continued to appear in net.sf-lovers
as well. Here's the first post that I can find in net.movies.sw. It was
apparently short lived, as the last posts are in July 1985 when it was removed
as a Newsgroup. Here is it being considered for deletion. Part
of the explanation for its deletion reads "There seems little reason to
support this group until a new Star Wars epic comes out (years), and we can
recreate the group at that time, should the net last so long." The net
lasted, but Usenet did not.

There is a gap here, but my best guess is that the majority of threads were
posted to both rec.arts.sf-lovers (which dates
back to Nov 1986), and to net.sf-lovers which had previously
been used by SW fans before the net.movies.sw newsgroup anyway. It should also be noted that a lot of
collectors during this time period were communicating and doing deals through
the TKRP catalogs, which were periodicals filled with both for sale and want
ads. All communication through these
magazines was done using the regular mail though, the slowness of which would
undoubtedly infuriate modern collectors used to instantaneous contact.

In May of 1995, the collecting aspect of the hobby split off to form rec.arts.sf.starwars.collecting(RASSC).
This would prove to be one of the most important events the hobby ever had, as
for the first time, collectors had their own community, and didn't have to
share it with other non-collector fans. Now, this might sound like a given to modern collectors, but at the
time, it was a big deal and resulted in heated discussion. Collecting was seen as merely an offshoot of
fandom, and the thought at the time was that there couldn’t possibly be enough
conversation to necessitate a separate group.

In May 1997, the group split again to form rec.arts.sf.starwars.collecting.vintage
(RASSCV). Here's the first post I can find there. This was another very important (and hotly
contested) issue. Vintage and modern discussion would be separated for the
first time, and collectors found themselves in two camps. Now you were a "Vintage SW
Collector" or a “Modern SW Collector,” rather than simply being a "SW
Collector." RASSCV is fondly remembered as a haven for obscure collecting
jokes and lots of great people. My own personal opinion is that the discussion
aspect of the group was hurt by eBay. Collectors
looking for an actual discussion had to sift through endless auction spam
threads, on account of usenet's lack of moderation. Some of these threads proved rather
interesting in the end, but the vast majority were pointless. Additionally, it meant that unpopular or
unpleasant people could stick around the group and couldn’t easily be
prohibited from posting.

In part due to these issues, people began to abandon all of usenet. It had no moderation, and was notoriously
difficult for some people to use. People
new to the hobby were mystified by what they saw as an outdated means of online
communication, and instead preferred to frequent online forums. Many collectors found their way to the now
defunct SWCA Collector Connection, which opened in 2000 here on the SWCA. Of which, the only parts which still remain
are the the main page, and the list of thread topics. A lot of the most active members of our current
vintage collecting community got their start here. It is remembered for several legendary threads
and the fact that it had a TON of pop-ups by the end.

The Bounty Hunter Collective was also a popular choice for collectors looking
for something easier to use than usenet, although it too is now long gone. Some of its threads can still be found here and here.

The RebelScum Rebel Lounge opened in 2001 with this thread and that proved to be another popular option for collectors
looking for a home.

Collectors could now choose between several different communities to post in. This was either very good, or very bad,
depending on how you wanted to look at it. Discussion was fragmented, so unless you read
every board, you missed something. On
the other hand, since there were several different boards, there were several
different chances to add new collectors to the community rather than having one
monolithic forum for everyone.

Eventually the less popular forums were weeded out, and the
day soon came that the SWCA:CC closed down, and the BHC merged with the RebelSsum:Rebel
Lounge in this thread: Collectstarwars.com & Rebelscum.com Merger! For all intents
and purposes, RS was now the place for the majority of hobby discussion.In 2005, SWFUK started as a place for UK and international collectors to gather and discuss the hobby. Up until this point, the hobby had been centered almost entirely in US based forums which served a mostly North America based collector. SWF was one of the first forums to see the worldwide nature of the hobby and the demand for a place for international discussion. It also allowed its members much greater leeway in regards to language than the other forums at the time, and it grew in prominence thanks to surreptitious advertisements in eBay auctions.

Beginning around 2012 or so, collectors began to look to
Facebook as another good place to discuss SW collecting. Facebook has what are called groups, and it
allows anyone to create a group for basically anything you can think of. Other members can join these groups and share
their thoughts on the topic and post pictures. The most well-known Star Wars collecting groups are probably:

Since this is an entirely new avenue for collector
discussion, it might be helpful to take a moment and review the problems and
benefits of the Facebook Group system.

Problems:

Since all discussion on Facebook will be in
a Facebook Group dedicated to one topic, this can segment the community just like
usenet did. There are any number of
groups and no one can actively participate in all of them. Thus, the Group system creates several dozen
small communities with no overlap unless you belong to all of them. This also means that if someone gets
something new, chances are you’ll see it several different times because
they’ll post it to several different groups, which can get repetitive.

The Facebook Group system segments the discussion
based on what you’re interested in. In
other words, if you are interested in coins, the odds of you seeing something
in the group about 12” figures is virtually nil. This keeps discussion on topic, but it makes
it difficult to discover new areas of collecting you might be interested in.

A significant percentage of members don’t
know how to search for the material they’re looking for in past discussions,
which means that the same questions will be asked a lot.

The discussion is not threaded, so if there
are two posts about the same issue, they will not be connected in anyway unless
one is a reply to the other.

The groups can be exclusive, in some cases. You need to be invited to join some of the groups,
and most require approval before you can begin posting.

They are moderated by an administrator to
different degrees, which means that someone else will decide what is and isn’t
included in the record. Some groups will
allow the craziest things you can imagine and others are so heavily moderated
that it stifles conversation.

Conversation is mostly based around
pictures, which means that it depends on people limelighting their items,
rather than collectors truly discussing the ins and outs of the hobby in the
abstract. While it’s possible (and easy)
to create a text-based post, most members don’t.

Some of the groups have so many members that
most of them will be strangers. It’s
difficult to know everyone and many of the people have a less than cordial
posting style.

It is a system that is utterly dependent on
Facebook as far as access to older threads go. Facebook could unilaterally decide
to purge the conversation history, and all of that information would be lost
since it’s not backed up anywhere and is incapable of being preserved by its
users.

The groups tend to involve a lot of short
posts and replies. Very seldom do you
see posts of more than a paragraph in length. In fact, almost everything in a group is said in about three sentences
or so. This means that if you’re looking
for in-depth discussion on an issue, it isn’t the best place to go.

Advantages:

The groups are easy to navigate if you’re
familiar with Facebook.

The groups are very easy for new collectors
to find, especially if they’re younger and used to using Facebook.

Since there are so many members and so many
people use Facebook throughout the day, you can get answers to your questions
very quickly.

You get a notice every time someone replies
to your post.

They allow for a great amount of
specialization in regards to discussion. If you’re interested in some obscure, random bit of collecting, you can
create a group for it and find dozens of other collectors out there who are
interested in the same thing.

You can set up exactly the community you
want, rather than simply routing out the people you don’t want. The Group system allows you to send out
invites to specific people and then close membership, meaning that if you only
want certain people to join, you can do that. Personally, I view this as a problem, but many view it as an advantage.

The groups tend to be large and very active. The members who use the groups are typically
from all levels of collecting, from someone just starting out to someone who’s
been collecting for decades. This
typically makes for a diverse and talkative member base.

Ultimately, it’s up to the individual collector to decide how and where to send his/her time. There are currently any number of different options available, more so than at any other time in the hobby’s history, and that’s not likely to change anytime soon. Personally, I would suggest utilizing both online forums and Facebook groups, since both have their advantages and disadvantages.

6 comments:

John Wooten and I came up with the forum idea during a late-night IM discussion about how we could make the Archive more interactive, more web 2.0-ish. John found the free software online. For a while it was great. But then the owners of the software imposed all of these awful pop-ups. Every time you clicked on something there was a pop-up. To make them go away you had to pay. No way were we gonna do THAT. I think that's what ultimately led to the forum's demise. That an the popularity of RS. Wish we'd been able to save all the discussion on there.

Yeah, the loss of those conversations is a real shame. :( I spent hours trying various methods of recovering them a few years ago, but the threads weren't saved by the Wayback Machine, only the thread indexes. That was the first place I ever started posting. You wrote me an email saying something to the effect of: "We just opened our forums. You should start posting there." So I did. When it shut down, for some reason I didn't follow everyone over to RS and I simply went back to lurking. Honestly, it's probably for the best that all my old posts are now gone though. I remember saying some pretty stupid things. :- )